Page 1 (1/1)

The Lynx exploded, expanded

The frigate&039;s energy-sink hty square kilometers The ered ranks of tiny onal pattern by a lacework of easy gravity It shiod&039;s spectruhostly, translucent peacock seeking to rut In battle, it could disperse ten thousand gigawatts per second, a giant lace fan burning hot enough to blind naked human eyes at two thousand klicks

The satellite-turrets of the ship&039;s four photon cannon eased away fro on hypercarbon scaffolds that always recalled to Captain Laurent Zai the iron bones of ancient cantilever bridges They were removed on their spindly arms four kilometers from the vessel proper, and the Lynx was shielded from the cannon&039;s collateral radiation by twenty centi the cannon would afflict the Lynx&039;s creith only the most treatable of cancers The four satellite-turrets carried sufficient reaction ence to operate independently if released in battle And from the safety of a few thousand kiloazines could be ordered to crashfire, consu one final, lethal needle toward the enemy Of course, the cannon could also be crashfired fro their lory That was one of the frigate&039;s five standard netic rail that launched the Lynx&039;s drone complement descended from her belly, and telescoped to its full nineteen-hundred-e scout drones, a squadron of ram-scatters, and a host of sandcasters deployed themselves around the rail The ramscatters bristled like nervous porcupines with their host of tiny flechettes, each of which carried sufficient fuel to accelerate at two thousand gees for almost a second The sandcasters were bloated with dozens of self-propelled canisters, whose cerah relative velocity of this battle, sand would be Zai&039;s ainst the Rix receiver array

Inside the rail bay, great azines of other drone types were loaded in a carefully calculated order of battle Stealth penetrators, broadcast decoys, hter craft, close-in-defense pickets all awaited their le deadman drone waited This drone could be launched even if the frigate lost all power, accelerated by highly directional explosives inside its dedicated backup rail The dead its copy of the last two hours&039; logfiles, which it would attempt to deliver to Imperial forces if the Lynx was destroyed

When we are destroyed, Captain Laurent Zai corrected himself His ship was not likely to survive this encounter; it was best to accept that The Rix vessel outpowered and outgunned them Its creas auicker and more adept, so intimately linked into the battlecruiser&039;s as a subject more for philosophical debate thancommandos were deadly: faster, hardier, ravity And, of course, they were unafraid of death; to the Rix, lives lost in battle were no lass of wine

Zai watched his bridge creork, preparing the newly configured Lynx to resu for the restructuring to firate to the stresses of acceleration It was a relief to be out of high-gee, if only for a few hours When the engageo into evasivecontinuously Next to that chaos, the last teeks of steady high acceleration would seem like a pleasure cruise

Captain Zai wondered if there was any mutiny left in his crew At least two of the conspirators had escaped Hobbes&039;s trap Were there more? The senior officers must realize that this battle was unwinnable They understood what a Rix battlecruiser was capable of, and would recognize that the Lynx&039;s battle configuration had been designed to dae its opponent, not preserve itself Zai and ExO Hobbes had optimized the ship&039;s offensive weaponry at the expense of its defenses, orienting its entire arsenal on the task of destroying the Rix receiver array

Now that the Lynx was at battle stations, even the junior officers would be able to spot the ill portents that surrounded them

The boarding skiffs ree cells It was unlikely that Zai&039;s ulf to capture the Rix battlecruiser Boarding actions were the privilege of the winning vessel Instead, Ihout the Lynx, ready to defend it fro it into helplessness Normally under these conditions, Zai would have issued sidearms to the crew to help repel boarders But after the mutiny this seemed a risky show of faith Most oularity generator, the most draed to h to the enemy battlecruiser, the two craft would share a drary, blind drunk hurtling into a bar fight with gritted teeth, ferally anxious to inflict daht feel herself

Perhaps that was their one advantage in this fight, Zai thought: desperation Would the Rix try to protect the vulnerable receiver array? Their mission was obviously to cois But would the dictates of saving the array force the Rix coht be soriht aside Hope was not his ally, he had learned over the last ten days

He turned his e airscreen and its detailed schematic of the Lynx&039;s internal structure

The wireframe lines shifted like a puzzle box, as walls and bulkheads inside the frigate slid into battle configuration Common roounnery stations, passageidened for easier ency repair teams Crew bunks transfor the zero-gee courts and running tracks that usually surrounded it Walls sprouted handholds in case of gravity loss, and everything that ht come loose in sudden acceleration was stowed, velcroed, bolted down, or si, and extruding all came to a halt, and the schematic eased into a stable shape Like a well-craftedinto place, the vessel becae crew half-turned toward Zai Their faces were expectant and excited, ready to begin this fight regardless of the ship&039;s chances He saw it most in Katherie Hobbes&039;s expression They&039;d been beaten back on Legis XV, all of thee The mutiny, however small and aborted, had shaht, and their bloodlust, however desperate, was good to see

It was just possible, Laurent Zai allowed himself to think, that they would eet horadually returned, pressing hiate accelerated

The Lynx moved toward battle